I’ve often used the term weaponized cuteness to refer to “cute” the products coming out of Japan. Hello Kitty and the PARO Therapeutic Robots being particularly good examples(the PARO robot especially. If you ever get a chance to see one in person, be sure to check it out. The videos …
This very short post isn’t about Derek Parfit’s book On What Matters, per se, but on the thoughts that came up while reading it. His phrasing of the arguments reminded me a lot of the way we phrased rules “back in the day” when expert systems were at the cutting …
Prompted by reading The Oxford Handbook of Causation I’m not going to talk too much about the book itself, except to say that it was way too short. Although it’s possibly strange to say that about an 800+ page book, causation is a huge topic and each approach to it …
Down Girl is a deeply impressive book. At first, reading her discussion of misogynist actions vs misogynists, I was thinking: “yes, makes complete sense, but reminds me of Jay Smooth’s How To Tell Someone They Sound Racist video” (which didn’t appear to be referenced). However, she proceeded to expand on it in ways …
Epistemic Angst by Duncan Pritchard This book is a somewhat unusual in that it is a book length treatment of radical skepticism. Radical skepticism, simply stated, is the claim “we can’t be certain that we aren’t just a brain in a vat, and if we can’t be sure of that, …
Waking, Dreaming, Being by Evan Thompson The subtitle of the book self and consciousness in neuroscience, meditation, and philosophy, captures what I like best about it: it examines three separate disciplines to see what they say about the issues of self and consciousness, examining their areas of focus and how …
The Conscious Mind is a 20+ year old book, which I got vectored back to recently. I’ll admit that left me cold, so much so that I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. I got bogged down in the Can Consciousness Be Reductively Explained section, and even granting his ground …
This book has been out for over a decade, but only recently hit my radar. It begins with the assumption that we are unlikely to (ever) get a fully detailed causal explanation of human scale events, e.g., a full up quantum level analysis of why bumping the table with your …
My goal here is to do a quick fleshing out of the term Augmented Reality (AR), since I find its meaning, including my own use of it, imprecise. Axes I’ll use these axes for analysis, even though they’re not completely orthogonal, they highlight significantly different factors: Physical Scale: Personal <-> …
I had an Augmented Reality (AR) app rejected by Apple recently because it “wasn’t interactive enough”. My argument that it was a sculpture, didn’t get any traction with the reviewers. In fairness, I did have a discussion with one of the reviewers and I felt that he was genuinely trying …